I’d Like an Argument, Please
Twice this week I’ve heard the claim that ignorance is strength—that not knowing what’s been done before in an area is actually an advantage, because then you’re not hamstrung by preconceptions. When challenged, the people making the claim offer hypotheticals: “Would Louis Armstrong have invented jazz if he’d studied classical music?” (He actually did know a lot of the kind of classical music the Boston Pops plays today, and didn’t really invent jazz.) As I’ve said elsewhere, I think the real reason people want to believe in “unschooled genius” is that it gives them an excuse to not shovel a mountain of prior art looking for a handful of diamonds. What I’m looking for now, though, is something I remember reading several years and several computers ago: a medium-sized essay that shredded the “ignorance is strength” argument both logically and evidentially. If you were smarter than me, and not only bookmarked it, but copied that bookmark forward onto whatever machine you’re using now, I’d be grateful if you’d share it.
Later: I appreciate the anecdotes people have added as comments, but anecdotes (in any direction) aren’t proof. What I really need is the detailed, evidence-backed argument…
I’d love to help dig it up! Do you remember anything else about the essay – specific, salient examples cited, in particular, that bolstered the claim?
Nope
It read like something from Atlantic or New Yorker, but I’ve searched both.
So, I started here, though it asserts the opposite:
http://billpetti.com/2010/12/13/ignorance-innovation/
And it guided me to Bob Sutton’s stuff, which I the essay you’re looking for might have been attacking (or which might have been a response *to* that essay): http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/12/harnessing-ignorance-to-spark-creativity.html
Maybe not. Sutton is more about the applications to design rather than the article at a society level.
Neither of these are manifestly an essay, and may be off base, but they’re a pair of threads to follow. Again, I’ll see what else comes up.
(Jumbled writing -> might need more coffee)
The best I can give is Malcolm Gladwell’s Outlier book. He makes the point that it takes 10K hours to become expert level. In the case of many young experts, what really happened is that they just practiced intensely at younger ages. The examples he give are Mozart and Bobby Fischer who while young when they started becoming well known in their fields, they both started their craft at the age of 3.
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/malcolm-gladwell%E2%80%99s-new-book-outliers-and-the-10000-hour-rule/
My view has been more that the younger you are the less inhibitions you have to starting something new. The whole Ender’s game thesis. I’ve actually not heard the “ignorance is strength” meme but find that it must be wrong.
Socrates in Plato’s Meno does make a point with a slave boy by having him construct the sqrt of 2, making the point that novices can connect with the “natural world” to learn basic truths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno#Dialogue_with_Meno.27s_slave
I’m not convinced. At least two Turing Award winners, John Backus and Ken Iverson, largely worked independently and ignored whatever else was being done in the field.
That’s why Backus created the “Functional Programming” that was the subject of his Turing Award lecture, not knowing that the term was already used for something related but different (when he found out he changed it to “Function Level Programming”). That work was unique (and a good thing too or it could have been embarrassing for him to have “invented” something that was already well known).
Having known Iverson personally I can attest to his not being particularly impressed by other people’s work, and as his son Eric put it at an event yesterday commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book “A Programming Language”, Iverson and his colleagues “didn’t really care what anyone else thought” (I may not have the precise wording).
Hi Greg,
This does not help for your search for your lost article but it sorta lands between the two extremes that are being talked about …. ignorance and knowledge.
When asked what style he used when working as a mentor, John Pople answered,
“I tell them rather simple things, to think about things fundamentally, go to the core of the problem. I tell them to think about it before reading literature too fully. I think that’s an important thing. I think too much of a tendency in this country for education is for people to say that you have to read everything up to date before you start doing research.
I think it’s desirable to identify your problem, to think about it, see what you can formulate yourself and then when you’ve made some progress with it, then go to the literature and see what other people have said. You may well find that you’ve done something different from what they’ve done.” – from SIR JOHN POPLE Ph.D.
ORAL HISTORY.
BTW the article itself is an interesting read about a pioneer in computation science:
http://www.cwhonors.org/archives/histories/POPLE.pdf
I think it is silly to say that ignore is strength. However, the belief that you should follow the experts of your time is certainly a weakness.
Examples:
The financial crisis of 2008 was *not* on the radar of the leading economists.
The web was invented by a physicist, not by a librarian. Many librarians resisted the Web.
Wikipedia was not invented by a publishing house. In fact, most publishers ridiculed wikipedia.
YouTube was not invented by a media company or a TV station.
Blogs and Twitter were not invented by journalists. In fact, journalists ridiculed blogs initially.
Amazon.com was invented by a computer scientist, not a bookstore owner. Bookstores were dismissive of Amazon.com initially.
The iPhone was invented by a company that made computers and MP3 players, not portable phones.
The leading edge in self-driving cars is not a General Motors, but at Google, a search company.
Typo warning: “ignore”->”ignorance”
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but –
http://char.txa.cornell.edu/language/creative.htm, see “Preparation for research”.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/14/kirby-ferguson-ted/, remix culture.
and
http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/museumeducation/priorknowledge.html
It’s hard to know what page you’re seeking, but the original quote may be unintentionally ironic… the end of Thomas Gray’s poem is where it started, with a completely different meaning that the endorsements of ignorance today:
http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odec
If someone is boasting about not learning, then perhaps prompt them to establish the basis of their claim…?
(btw, I knew Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac were unsustainable soon after Carter politicized them, and definitely after neither of the Bushes fixed it. Ain’t rocket science.)